


Denver

by pleasebekidding



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Canon Temporary Character Death, Compulsion, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2014-10-12
Packaged: 2018-02-20 21:15:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2443385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pleasebekidding/pseuds/pleasebekidding
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It all falls into place at eighteen minutes past ten on a school night. It can only mean one thing. Damon Salvatore is dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Denver

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SordidSalvatore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SordidSalvatore/gifts).



> This fic goes AU early in season three, with Alaric, Jeremy and Elena moving to Colorado, and ends with them remembering why they did it. For Demi.

_Denver, Colorado, present day_

Alaric contemplates steaks, on their little polystyrene mat. There are three. Is he cooking three steaks? What day is it? He rubs his eyes. It’s the close of the school term, exams, and his usual methods of remembering the day are failing him; that, and he has a hell of a lot of marking to do, which is addling his brain.

Behind him, Elena pulls a couple of tumblers from the cupboard.

“Two,” he says. “So Jeremy…”

“Studying. Last exam for the year is tomorrow, so he’s at his study group.”

“Study group. You mean he’s at his girlfriend’s house, pretending to study while trying to talk her out of her clothes.” But Jenny’s a nice girl. And Jeremy’s a good kid. So Alaric has some optimism, at least.

Elena smiles, and Alaric puts two steaks out on the pan. “Guess who called for you,” she says, as she slices cherry tomatoes into quarters for a salad.

“I give up.”

“Lily.”

Alaric grins, and shakes his head. “Don’t, Elena,”

“What? She’s really pretty, and she’s really into you, and she’s just your type…”

“My type? What do you know about my type?” And he’s laughing, because Isobel and Jenna couldn’t have been more different. He grinds some cracked pepper over the meat.

“You always check out anyone with a nice bod, dark hair, and pale eyes.” Elena giggles, and really, it’s the most glorious sound, especially when Alaric lets himself remember that there was a time when he didn’t hear it, for months on end. “The Isobel type.”

“So I have a type,” he says, leaning against the counter with his arms crossed and his face half-pulled into a smile. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Call her back. There’s this thing. It’s called dating, Ric. It’s fun. And it ends with me getting to be a bridesmaid in a couple of years.”

Alaric rolls his eyes, and returns to the steaks

Some time later, with dinner on the table, Elena sits back and points her fork at him. “I’ve decided. I’m definitely declaring pre-med.”

Alaric has to smile; not so much that he wanted her to, but the aimlessness of the last couple of years faded slowly and has lately disappeared, and it’s a good look.

“Your father would be proud.” And the glasses they clink together are only water, but it still feels like a celebration, so whatever. After dinner, they do the washing up, in the tiny kitchen in their lovely home on East 17th Avenue, where the sun won’t set for another hour, peaceful, calm, and untroubled.

\--

They’ve been living here a couple of years, now. Alaric was offered a job seemingly out of the blue, from the University of Colorado. At first, he only thought it might be nice to go and see it; hadn’t expected such a visceral reaction to the mountains, the green spaces, even the buildings in the university itself. He’d come home to Mystic Falls feeling homesick already, and spent a silent two days thinking about what he could possibly do. Leave the fight, leave Mystic Falls behind? He couldn’t leave Jeremy or Elena, he was sure of it. He sat in the loft with a bottle of bourbon one night, steeling himself to turn the job down, and was surprised to hear Elena knock on the door.

(Such a distinct knock.)

He let them in, expecting accusations, or worse, anger and hurt he wouldn’t be able to handle. But Jeremy sat on the coffee table, and Elena sat curled into Alaric’s side on the couch, and they talked.

“Damon told us,” Elena admitted, and Alaric started to shake his head.

“I’m not going. I can’t leave you guys, I won’t. I –”

Jeremy and Elena shared a look, and Elena pressed a finger to Alaric’s lips.

“We want you to take it, and we want to come, too. It’s an incredible opportunity.”

It was like falling from a height. Leave their friends? Their home? What could possibly make them want to do that? For months Elena had been able to focus on nothing, not a single thing, but getting Stefan back.

He’d tried to find a way to say all of that, but Elena had shaken her head, and Jeremy had said nothing.

“If we stay here,” Elena had said, tears filling her pretty eyes, “We’re going to die, or worse.”

They had been silent for a long time, and Elena had reached out to take Jeremy’s hand. There was a nasty bruise on his wrist.

“How did you get that?” Alaric had asked, concerned.

“Caught my bracelet on something yesterday. Doesn’t hurt. Listen to you, you’re in dad mode already, and we haven’t even left.” But he’d looked relieved, as well, and Alaric realized dad mode was what he needed. What they both did. So they decided, the three of them, to leave.

Telling everyone else was difficult. Caroline cried rivers, but didn’t try to stop it from happening. Bonnie was silent, and said little, beyond telling Elena she hoped they were making the right decision; she couldn’t even look at Jeremy.

Stefan was somewhere on the east coast, eating everyone in sight.

Damon drank two bottles of bourbon and said he didn’t care what anyone did; it was surprising how much that jarred, but Alaric reminded himself that Damon was old, and he’d really only known Elena a couple of years – and if anyone knew how to find his feet, it was his idiot best friend.

Late in February, while the snow was still hiding beneath the lowest bushes, a moving van full of all of their worldly possessions had pulled up outside their pretty house in their fairytale street in Denver, and the rest is history.

\--

There is no cat food.

“Elena! Did you get cat food?”

Elena appears at the top of the stairs.

“Um.” She turns a pen in her hand. It could be Virginia; she’s wearing tiny blue jean shorts and a tank top. She’s not the little girl he met. She’s strong, she’s tough, she runs and works out and her delicate, long frame now looks a little more Amazonian. “I thought we weren’t encouraging the cat anymore?”

Alaric can’t not feed a stray. Besides, his fate was sealed when he got the mite neutered in December.

“I’ll be back,” he says, raising an eyebrow. “Need anything from the store?”

Elena shakes her head, backing into her room.

This is not what Alaric imagined his life was going to be like. If he had, the last few years would have been easier to take, knowing how it would all turn out.

\--

It should be said; Jeremy is legitimately studying, though these last few exams don’t really matter. He has a full ride to art school next year and he doesn’t even have to move out of the house (ka-ching). It’s occurred to him to wonder, more than once, why he’s pleased about this; isn’t he supposed to want to leave the nest? But living with Elena and Alaric is easy. Alaric doesn’t bust his chops if he has a couple of drinks, though the guy barely drinks himself, these days. He and Elena are close. If he thinks about it, he’s not particularly keen on the idea of a share house full of guys who never mastered keeping their own kitchen clean.

He even likes Elena’s hippie boyfriend, who has dragged him out camping in the mountains a couple of times.

Jenny has her face scrunched the way she does when she’s focusing, biting the inside of her cheek, frowning. Soft curls framing her face (she straightens her hair, but by evening, the curls are rebelling their way back) and her golden brown eyes flashing in irritation.

“This is stupid,” she says. She’s smart, but she doesn’t read too well, and she gets frustrated easily. And since the day they met, she’s reminded Jeremy of someone, and he can’t quite put his finger on who that might be. Probably a character from a TV show. He climbs off the bed to read over her shoulder. Biochem sucks, but he sort of gets it.

He pulls a step stool towards the table, and reaches for a pencil. Viral replication; he can remember, sort of. A quick glance at the time. It’s ten-eighteen. He really should go; curfew at eleven on a school night.

He glances at Jenny’s face, and for a second, it’s not Jenny’s face.

“Vicki,” he says. “You remind me of Vicki Donovan.” It’s like being punched in the gut.

\--

Elena is lying on her bed, talking to Sean, her boyfriend, who objects to texting on aesthetic grounds, and doesn’t like the night to end without them having spoken for at least a few minutes. In the background, his dog is terribly excited about something. Some cat, probably. Elena is giggling, because Sean always makes her giggle, and already she can’t remember what he is saying. She yawns, and runs her fingers over the inside of her thigh, wishing he was there right now.

“So this weekend,” she says. “No more exams…”

“No more exams. Maybe I’ll steal you away for a few days. My grandparents’ cabin is empty. The weather will be warm. You can stay naked all weekend and just let me feed you and make love to you…”

Elena loves the way he says ‘make love’. She glances at the alarm clock beside her bed, and sighs, hand going to her neck. It’s a little after a quarter past ten, too early to sleep, but she’s tired.

And then she is not. Her necklace is gone, and it’s such a terrifying, disorienting feeling that she sits up abruptly, eyes wide, reaching around to find where it has fallen. Stefan gave her that necklace! And Damon clipped it around her neck. Tears are pouring from her eyes, and she’s babbling into the phone, and she can barely hear Sean’s commands to calm down.

“My necklace,” she sobs. “I lost my necklace. The necklace Stefan gave me. I never take it off!”

“Babe,” Sean says. “Babe, calm down, you must be half asleep. I’ve never seen you wear a necklace.”

Damon is entering the room, with her birthday present. She shifts the hair aside, and he clips it at the back, like a promise that Stefan will be back one day. She hangs up the phone, and buries her face in the blankets, and wishes she was dead.

\--

The supermarket is quiet, so it only takes Alaric a few minutes to find the cat food. Seriously, for a stray, the cat (who Elena and Jeremy call ‘Boots’ despite the fact that his feet are as uniformly black as the rest of him) is damn picky, and it’s only a careful juggling of three different brands of wet food and two of dry that keep him from waking them at all hours not because he has _no_ food but because he has the _wrong_ food. Alaric smiles at the girl behind the counter. His type, according to Elena. Dark hair, pale blue eyes. Maybe she has a point.

Maybe he will call Lily. What would a date hurt? It’s been over two years since Jenna died.

He loads the bags into the back of the Tahoe. Fifty bucks worth of cat food, plus milk and bread. It’s clear who runs the Saltzman-Gilbert household.

He eases the truck out of the car park and out onto the street, humming quietly in time with the radio. When did the nineties become an appropriate decade for a nostalgia station? That’s really, really embarrassing. He glances at the clock.

Ten eighteen.

“You’d make a good vampire, Ric.” Lips at his throat, an insistent tug at his jeans, and Alaric cannot say no to Damon, never could. Rarely tries, anymore. Just feels like a waste of effort, when they both want this so badly. There is that smile no one ever sees but Alaric. It’s a genuine smile, even when it’s cautious, and it falls away from his face the moment Alaric pins him to the bed, or whatever is handy…

“Oh, fuck,” he says, and it’s like a knife in the chest, it’s that’s painful. And there is a car horn, two, and Alaric realizes he’s veered into the wrong lane. He overcorrects, and hits a light pole, and then the memories blessedly vanish in a flash of broken glass and screaming brakes.

\--

“Elena!”

Jeremy bursts through the door, not half an hour after that terrifying, disorienting moment, and doesn’t even close the door as he flies up the stairs and into his sister’s room. She is curled up in the fetal position, knees flush against her chest like they are what will hold her insides inside. Jeremy slows down, cautious, reaching to touch her shoulder, and she finally becomes aware of him.

She almost crawls into his lap, arms wrapped around his neck like a spider monkey.

“What’s happening, Jeremy? What’s happening? Why am I… my necklace, I lost my necklace.”

Nothing makes sense, but Jeremy holds on tight, whispering into her hair, _it’ll be okay, where’s Ric, we’ll figure it out, we’ll call Bonnie, Bonnie will know what’s happening_. But it’s hard, because he can see Vicki straddling his waist, pupils like pin pricks as she rocks against him, high as a kite and needy and untouchable, even while she touches him like this. Curling her body against his, out in the cemetery, crying because she misses her mother and Matt can’t understand her and it seems to hurt him to try. He sees it with his eyes wide open and on Elena; when he closes his eyes, it’s even worse.

The phone keeps ringing, and Jeremy reaches across to answer it. Sean.

“She’s okay,” Jeremy lies, as Sean asks a barrage of questions, he and wonders if Elena’s mind is as full of Stefan as his is of Vicki right now. “She just needs…”

“I’m on my way there,” Sean says, and Jeremy can hear the car door slam.

“Don’t, please… fuck, Alaric’s on the other line. Can you wait?”

Elena’s phone is too complicated, but Jeremy gets the other line. “Alaric, are you –” but the voice that cuts him off isn’t Alaric’s. It booms, instead of stretching tight across a gravel road, and it is trained to keep people calm.

“This is Colin Marshall, from the University of Colorado Hospital. Are you related to the man who owns this phone?”

Jeremy feels his breath begin to labor, his eyes cloud over. “I’m his son,” he says, clutching the phone. “Is he okay? My sister’s here –”

“He’s been involved in an accident,” says the voice, not unkindly. “Is your mother there? Someone needs to bring –”

Of course, no one looking at Alaric would imagine his ‘kids’ were eighteen and twenty.

“Just tell me if he’s alive.”

Elena sits up, frantic, tears pouring fresh from her eyes. How many times in their young lives has the entire world been pulled out from underneath them?

“He’s alive, but he’s in a serious condition.”

“We’ll be there soon,” Jeremy says, and closes his eyes, pulling Elena’s head against his chest. He switches lines again. “Sean, man, change of plans. Ric’s been hurt. You need to take us to the hospital.”

\--

It had started the day Damon and Alaric had rescued Stefan from the tomb vampires. After a day of snarking at each other, and a mutually hopeless attempt to keep Elena from getting herself into the line of fire, they’d found themselves at the Grill, Alaric so physically exhausted he could barely move, Damon itching for the next bit of excitement, and electricity cracking across his body. Leaning too far into Alaric’s personal space.

Alaric was shocked when he found himself punching Damon across the jaw, but he was even more shocked when five minutes later he had Damon pinned to the wall in the alley out the back of the Grill, while their hands and bodies got better acquainted.  He was more shocked than that when Damon apologized, on his knees, demonstrating the benefits of not actually needing to breathe, seeming to enjoy Alaric’s hand fisted in his hair.

They hadn’t said a single word about it, afterwards. Had barely spoken, even, in almost a fortnight. Alaric had tried to put it out of his mind. He cooked for Jenna and Elena and Jeremy and he pretended it simply hadn’t happened. It seemed like the safest option.

Better than finding reasons to walk past the Grill every evening just to see if Damon was there, which was the other thing he had been doing.

And then one night, he’d been there. Hunched over in his usual spot, that leather jacket, hair looking like birds nested in it. Alaric had thought for a moment, and headed in, taking the seat beside him and flagging the bartender down for a drink.

“Not that I’m hurt, Ric,” Damon had said, sounding yes, distinctly hurt. “But I usually get a call back after I’ve made a guy’s knees collapse from under him.” The bartended had looked up, meeting Damon’s eyes, Alaric’s, her own going as wide as her mouth. Damon waved his fingers in the air.

“You heard nothing,” he said, and she settled her features back to neutral. Meanwhile, Alaric was actually blushing, a habit he thought he’d broken in high school.

“Please,” he’d said. “Like you were sitting at home, looking at your tarnished promise ring and staring at the phone.”

Damon had said nothing. He’d just left.

\--

Jeremy and Elena rush into the emergency waiting room while Sean finds somewhere to park the car; Jeremy wishes he would leave, but he won’t, Jeremy knows that. And maybe it’s better, for Elena. Maybe she needs to be tethered to Sean, so her heart won’t fill with memories of Stefan and explode. Her hand moves to her throat every few moments, looking for the necklace she hasn’t worn in nearly two years.

When they find someone who will talk to them, the news sounds alright.

“He hit his head badly,” says the doctor. She’s barely five feet tall, and very black, hair tucked into a severe looking knot at the base of her skull. “They’re in surgery right now, relieving the pressure. A lot of facial lacerations, a broken arm. As long as this surgery goes well, he should be conscious in a few hours. You’re his _children_?”

Elena bursts into tears, and Jeremy nods cautiously. “Adopted.” It’s as much as he can say about the mess their lives are made of without pouring out his life story; a significant amount of which he has only just remembered in the last hour or so. “So we can see him?”

“After surgery,” the doctor says, pointing them to the waiting room. “I’ll keep you updated. Nothing you can do until then. You’ll need to answer some questions at the front desk. Does he have any allergies?”

She is efficient, and businesslike, and it’s reassuring, somehow.

Elena is the one who says “no, nothing.”

“Was he drinking tonight?”

“He never drinks through the week,” she says, and Jeremy knows that she is remembering the same thing that he does; that there was a time when the weight of the world was so heavy on Alaric’s shoulders that he couldn’t get a wink of sleep without half a bottle of bourbon to knock him out.

\--

The memories float in like ash, layer upon layer, until Elena is starting to see the whole picture. Damon compelling her to leave… no, it hadn’t been like that. He’d taken her bracelet, and she’d been suddenly wary, and he’d made that face, looking at her down his nose, shushing her. “Listen to me,” he’d said. “You want to leave Mystic Falls. You want to be safe. You want to grow up and go to college and be a normal girl.”

He’d compelled her to _want_ to leave,

Now, she can remember the moment of crushing sadness she’d felt when she’d realized what he was doing; but she’d nodded, head suddenly full of cotton wool.

“I want to be a normal girl,” she’d agreed, tears welling, and Damon had gripped her hands.

“You want to go to school, and do what Ric tells you to do, and look after Jeremy.” He’d sounded calm, and adult, like he’d made a big decision and all that was left was to carry it out.

“I want to,” she’d agreed, and he’d reached up to brush a tear away from her cheek. And he’d looked so sad. Why had he done that, if it had made him so sad?

“It’s better,” he’d said, like he was apologizing. Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “It’s better for all of you. Get some sleep. Tomorrow, talk to Jeremy, and then go and see Ric. He has a job offer. He wants to take it. But he won’t, if you won’t go as well. It’s an incredible opportunity.”

An _incredible opportunity_.

She closes her eyes, and crosses her arms on her knees, trying to right the world.

“He crashed the car at the same time I realized I lost my necklace,” she says. She sounds like she’s been swilling bourbon and chain smoking Cubans all night. “I bet he did. What did you…”

“Vicki,” Jeremy says, but he doesn’t move. “Ever noticed how much Jenny looks like her?”

They are silent for a long time, listening to the hustle and bustle of a busy hospital, quiet sobbing, the beeps that tell the world that a person is still alive and the beeps that tell people that someone’s not long for this world.

“Damon’s dead, isn’t he,” Elena says, eyes still closed hard, and a lump swelling in her throat.

Jeremy says nothing, just reaches to rub circles over her back.

\--

Alaric wakes with someone shining a light in his eyes, and a horrible feeling of choking; several sets of hands on his body, trying to hold him down.

“He’s coming out of it. Mr Saltzman. Please. You have a tube in your throat. Don’t fight it.” But he has to fight it, because for two years he hasn’t been fighting while the people he cares about fight and die. He struggles until he can’t, and when he opens his eyes again, Damon’s eyes are on him, atop a surgical mask.

“You had an accident. You’re in surgery. Blink twice if you understand,” says a voice, and it’s not Damon’s voice, and they’re not Damon’s eyes anymore either. Still, he calms, and he blinks twice.

“He’s responsive. We can close.” And then, quieter, kind; “You’re doing great,” says the voice, and Alaric is dragged under once more.

\--

Once things were working better, Damon had been a sponge, a limpet. Craving any kind of attention, and affection, and Alaric, blinded by love and desire, had been more than happy to give it to him. He crawled over Alaric’s body, kissing and touching like a man who had been starving for too many years to count, licking his lips like he was sizing Alaric up for dessert.

“I need to sleep,” Alaric groaned.

“Sleeping is so overrated.” Lips on Alaric’s chest, on his stomach, a capable hand closing over his cock. “Not having to waste eight hours a day – or in your case, four – is one of the best things about being a vampire.”

It was recent, this ‘best things about being a vampire’ thing of Damon’s. An extended sales pitch. Alaric had read between the lines, but it meant facing things he didn’t want to face, so he tended to go for a distraction.

He flipped them over, so Damon was immobile beneath him, or pretending to be. Lips swollen and wet, eyes bright and mischievous, in the loft at ten in the morning on a Saturday. He hoisted Damon’s leg up over his hip, nuzzling roughly into his throat.

“You’d make such a good vampire,” Damon had purred.

Alaric ached everywhere. He’d lost track of how many times they’d fucked since they’d left the Grill early the night before, and in how many positions, and against how many surfaces. He was bruised in places he couldn’t explain. He was covered in shallow, affectionate bites which he wouldn’t allow Damon to heal. Hickies decorated his collarbone and his throat, and he was wondering just how much of a hipster douchebag he’d look if he wore scarves indoors at the school for a week.

“You’re killin’ me,” he said, reaching for the lube because whether Damon was killing him or not, this body was a drug. Balls deep in the center of the universe, he muttered Damon’s name into his neck.

Problem was – problem always would be – that Alaric was human, and Damon was not. It wasn’t so much the reformed serial killer aspect of the situation, although that did give Alaric pause as well. But there was a use-by date on this thing.

Sometimes he forgot.

Sometimes it was like an LED display behind his eyelids.

He would get older, and then he’d get old. Damon wouldn’t stick around, Alaric had no illusions. And Alaric couldn’t watch that. Watch as his eye began to wander, as the body he proclaimed to love so much turned into something he couldn’t even bring himself to touch. One day, he’d be gone.

Damon’s solution was to turn him while he was still young, and strong, and beautiful. But the thought of turning made Alaric’s stomach clench. Risk killing people, so he could hang with his honey for all eternity? Watch everyone else get old, and die? What if it was worse, what if he was like Stefan, or Isobel? What if when he killed it wasn’t an accident, but a joy? Nope. He couldn’t do it, and he wouldn’t do it. And it was getting harder every day to pretend that wasn’t hanging over their heads.

\--

Alaric wakes in stages, coughing as he finds the tube is still in his throat, and then drifting off again when they remove it. Opening his eyes in the too bright room (and every time he does that, he sees Damon’s face, leaning in, teasing, staring at Alaric’s mouth, or sparkling hungrily as he holds Alaric’s gaze in his own) and then closing them again because he doesn’t want to think. He is distantly aware of pain not in his head, but in his scalp, and over his face. When the reaches up he finds a bandage covering his whole head, and another on his cheek.

 _You’d make a great vampire, Ric_. And Damon lowering himself into Alaric’s lap, rubbing against him like a cat, delighting in the simple fact that he is _wanted_ as fiercely as he _wants_ , for the first time in too many years to count. Alaric feels tears well in his eyes, and he wishes for sleep to take him again.

The next stage involves actually moving, as someone comes to check on his vital signs.

“Is my family here?”

“Look at you,” the nurse says. “Complete sentences. Very impressive, Mr. Saltzman. They’re here,” she says, peeling back the bandage on his face to check something – what, he doesn’t want to know. “Do you know what happened?”

Yeah, he knows what happened.

Damon is dead.

He grits his teeth, but that makes the pain worse, in his head and in his neck, so he lets himself relax again.

“I know as much as I need to,” he says, and also, “I need to see my family.”

\--

In the end, Alaric had gotten so fucking tired he couldn’t ignore it any more.

“I can’t be a vampire,” he’d said, in the boarding house. “Please stop askin’, stop hintin’ at it, just let us enjoy what we have now, while we have it.”

“Great,” Damon had snarled back. “Of course. Nothing ever goes my way.”

“Oh, shut up. Listen to me. This is not about you and me. This is about me as a vampire, and I can’t do that. Remember how you didn’t want to either? Remember that, Damon?”

They’d fought like dogs. Damon had broken at least a dozen crystal tumblers, one after the other, against the mantelpiece, and called Alaric every name he could think of, every name that might hurt.

Alaric had been determined to keep his own cool, but failed miserably in the second quarter. The second quarter saw them on opposite sides of the library, screaming at each other until Alaric had no more idea of what he was saying than what Damon was saying. He only knew that they had dug deep to find only the most vicious barbs they could. No topic was off limits, not Alaric’s dead wife, not Damon’s failure to notice Alaric had been possessed for days, not the way he kept pursing Elena once he had Alaric in his bed. Damon promised Alaric that no one in their right mind would choose the dull certainty of a lifetime with him over the possibility of an eternity without him, thoroughly lauding Isobel’s choice in the matter.

The third quarter had involved Damon and Alaric sitting at opposite ends of the couch, Damon drinking bourbon from the bottle because there were no more tumblers left, and Alaric wishing he’d continued with his policy of pretending this conversation could be put off indefinitely.

The fourth quarter was spent pulling at clothing and rearranging each other into impossible shapes on the carpet in front of the fireplace, the only sounds snatched cries and muttered yelps, and the long, low moan of orgasm, perhaps a snatch or two of a name.

_I’m sorry._

_I know._

They spent the overtime on the couch, Damon lying heavily on Alaric’s body as Alaric smoothed down hair that wouldn’t lie flat again until Damon washed it.

“You know this means we’re done,” Damon said, dully. But that was the way Damon was. Alaric knew he could talk him around. They were in love, as improbable and messy as that was. He wouldn’t let it just be over.

“No,” Alaric had answered, kissing the top of Damon’s head. “Just because it can’t last forever doesn’t mean it’s over now. We have time. Plenty of time.” And he meant it. No relationship came with guarantees.

\--

And now, Alaric can put the rest together himself. The following week, he’d arranged for Alaric’s miraculous job offer, he’d compelled them all (when had he compelled Alaric? There is an unformed memory, somewhere back there, of waking with Damon sitting on Alaric’s bed in the loft, with a sad, determined expression on his face and Alaric’s bracelet in his hand). Alaric supposes he must have convinced everyone else of the wisdom of this arrangement.

“You’re going to leave. You’re going to fall in love with Colorado and you’re going to want to leave here. Take the kids, be safe. Don’t think about Mystic Falls. Don’t think about me.”

It’s hard to believe, now, that Alaric had just nodded and agreed. “I won’t think about you.”

“You never loved me,” Damon had said, choking on the final syllable, and leaning in for a last kiss. How unfair was that? Their last kiss, and Alaric could only remember it now from this incredible distance.

Maybe he’d been right to do it.

A tear runs down Alaric’s face, just one, and the nurse pauses.

“You need more pain relief?”

What a joke.

“No,” he says. “I just want to see my family.”

\--

Elena fusses over the bandages, reads the chart like she understands what it says, and finally climbs up onto the bed to fit her body alongside Alaric’s. Careful to avoid his broken arm, in the scratchy white sling. Jeremy sits in the chair alongside, a million miles away.

“I can’t believe he would do that,” Elena says, her husky voice dull with pain. “I can’t believe…”

“Can’t you?”

Alaric reaches his good arm around her shoulders, and she is silent again. Jeremy leans back, staring at the ceiling.

“I saw you, once,” she admits, and Alaric closes his eyes.

“Where?”

“It was before a founders’ thing, that summer. Before my birthday. You were in his room. I went upstairs, and you…”

Alaric closes his eyes, and the monitor picks up the change in his heart rhythm. “I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you lost him too.”

Her hot tears drench the shoulder of his hospital gown. “I can’t believe he’s dead,” she says, sobbing.

Alaric can’t comfort her, with a flap of skin holding a piece of his skull in his head, but he closes his eyes and lets her cry.

\--

A week later, Alaric sits in the armchair by the bed he’s been stuck in for a week, duffel by his side, phone in his hand, waiting for them to come and pick him up. Signing out of the hospital is a long and boring task, made more complicated by the lack of a right arm. He is advised not to travel, to take a month off work, not to drive (as if he could!), and to return to the hospital if he has any dizzy spells.

Elena brings him a cap, to covered the bald patch shaved into his skull, and walks him to the car with one hand draped around his waist. Jeremy carries the bag, opens doors. They are all quiet. The easy, early Colorado days are over. Nothing will ever be the same again.

The house is quiet. Jeremy can’t look at Jenny without seeing Vicki, and Elena can’t bear Sean to touch her.

“Have you called Bonnie?” he asks, sitting at the kitchen bench with a tumbler of bourbon in his hand. Drinking is easier.

“She’s not answering. Neither is Stefan, and I can’t… I don’t think I even have Caroline’s number anymore. Ric…”

“So we go back,” he says, rubbing his eyes.

Because there’s no such thing as dead, not in Mystic Falls, not for a vampire, not until everyone has given up. Right?

“We go back,” Jeremy agrees, taking the bubble-pack of pain pills from Alaric’s hand to pop a couple out. He says nothing, as Alaric washes them down with a mouthful of Jack Daniels, trying not to let the scent of the stuff remind him too strongly of what he has lost.

**Author's Note:**

> Demi and I came up with the idea of Damon compelling Alaric away, and Alaric realizing on Damon's death, while OTP flailing on skype one night. Thank you beautiful <3


End file.
